Now that summer is upon us, the Big 5 have been overtaken with reality programming (which all seemingly had their premieres this past week). Since most scripted series are on hiatus, so too are my daily TV ratings pieces. However, I’ll still be collecting the biggest ratings stories of the week to post on Fridays. So let’s break down the weekly TV ratings for Monday, May 25th through Thursday, May 28th:
- On Monday, the Season 7 premiere of American Ninja Warrior at 8 p.m. pulled in a 1.8 rating in the key 18-49 demographic, and also notched 5.89 million viewers. The show was up 13 percent from its Season 6 premiere.
- ABC’s 500 Questions experiment pulled ok numbers during its week-long run. It ended nearly where it started, with a 1.1 rating both on Monday and for its Thursday finale, dropping to a 1.0 in between. The premiere garnered 5.22 million viewers, while the finale brought in 5.04. Overall, not terrible, but surely not the fanfare ABC was hoping for.
- Britt’s departure from The Bachelorette left the series shaken in the ratings, as the show dipped 24 percent to a 1.6 rating and 5.32 million viewers or ABC.
- On Tuesday, the season premiere of America’s Got Talent was down to a 2.6 rating (from last year’s 3.0) at 8 p.m. for NBC. But, it brought in 10.93 million viewers, giving NBC the overall win for the night.
- The season premiere of Fox’s revival of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? drew a 0.8 rating, down 38 percent from its last season premiere in 2008. But compared to other contemporary competition series in that time slot, it’s doing fairly well. It also garnered 3.31 million viewers.
- The series premiere of Extreme Weight Loss to an extreme dive from last year, dropping 31 percent to a 0.9 rating and 2.89 million viewers for ABC at 9 p.m.
- As the lone new scripted episode of the night, iZombie stayed steady on the CW with a 0.6 rating and 1.85 million viewers.
- The series premiere of I Can Do That on NBC at 10 p.m. improved upon The Night Shift’s numbers in that spot, kicking off to a 1.8 rating and 6.51 million viewers.
- Thursday, some scripted series finally start to show up. Bones, benefitting from a timeslot swept clean of competition, was up 20 percent at 8 p.m. on Fox to a 1.2 rating and 5.37 million viewers.
- Also on Fox, Wayward Pines stayed steady with a 1.2 rating and 3.96 million viewers at 9 p.m.
- The two-hour series premiere of Aquarius on NBC at 9 p.m. notched a 1.0 rating and 5.69 million viewers, which is the same as last summer’s launch of Crossbones. (Aquarius started with a 1.2 rating and ended with a 0.9, though, so …) It will be interesting, also, to see how NBC’s decision to put all of the series’s episodes online at once will affect the ratings in future weeks.